Words can't save Butch Jones. Quite the opposite.
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Butch Jones attracts a great deal of criticism — often for good reason, between the shortcomings of his football team and his personal penchant for making up phrases.
There comes a point, however, where all of it stops being funny, and it begins to feel like attending someone’s wake.
Monday proved to be yet another example of this, partly due to a slightly out-of-context quote. A tweet went viral suggesting that Jones said Tennessee did everything to win last Saturday’s game against South Carolina except score touchdowns. Which feels an awful lot like saying, hey, Butch Jones has done everything he’s needed to do in Knoxville to keep his job … except win enough football games.
Here’s the full quote from Monday’s news conference, which isn’t quite as bad as it seemed, by the way:
“I thought we did all the things it takes to play winning football, except one element, and we spoke about it after the game. And that’s score touchdowns in the red zone. We had to kick field goals.”
The thing is, when you're a college football coach whose fate essentially has been sealed, you don’t get the benefit of context. Hot-seat coaches get picked apart, word by word, questionable play-call by questionable play-call. And with Jones, you could easily make the case that he shouldn’t even still be coaching at this point, with either the Georgia blowout or the South Carolina debacle as all the evidence you’d need.
(Though it does seem particularly cruel to make him coachn Saturday against Alabama.)
Still, no matter how much you remind yourself these coaches are paid millions of dollars to shine bright or fail spectacularly in the public eye, it’s not necessarily easy to watch someone flail like this.
The most painful and vivid example I’ve personally witnessed was attending Michigan’s season-ending banquet in 2010 and seeing Rich Rodriguez, fighting tears, try to lead his players in singing Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.” The whole thing was uncomfortable — I still have the audio file — and reeked of the desperation one only feels when he knows his grip on his job has slipped away.
Rodriguez could have been cut loose (mercifully in this situation) after the lopsided loss to Ohio State that year or at any point in the month lead-up to a bowl game the Wolverines would lose, badly, to Mississippi State. But instead of letting him go, Michigan let him dangle for weeks and months. His words were parsed like Jones’s are now; Rodriguez’s actions grew increasingly desperate, a point Jones has reached, too. (See: the trash can.)
It’s not clear how much longer Jones has; it’s past the season’s midway point now, so perhaps he’ll just finish it out. But it will just keep getting more and more awkward as Tennessee prolongs what now feels like a public execution.
(Top photo: Randy Sartin / USA TODAY Sports)
